"Then said Great-heart to Mr. Valiant-for-Truth, Thou hast worthily behaved thyself. Let me see thy Sword. So he shewed it him. When he had taken it in his hand, and looked thereon a while, he said, Ha, it is a right Jerusalem Blade!"
The Pilgrim's Progress.
HUGH
I
HARE STREET
How loudly and boisterously the wind roared to-day across the low-hung, cloud-smeared sky, driving the broken rack before it, warm and wet out of the south! What a wintry landscape! leafless trees bending beneath the onset of the wind, bare and streaming hedges, pale close-reaped wheat-fields, brown ploughland, spare pastures stretching away to left and right, softly rising and falling to the horizon; nothing visible but distant belts of trees and coverts, with here and there the tower of a hidden church overtopping them, and a windmill or two; on the left, long lines of willows marking the course of a stream. The road soaked with rain, the grasses heavy with it, hardly a human being to be seen.
I came at last to a village straggling along each side of the road; to the right, a fantastic-looking white villa, with many bow-windows, and an orchard behind it. Then on the left, a great row of beeches on the edge of a pasture; and then, over the barns and ricks of a farm, rose the clustered chimneys of an old house; and soon we drew up at a big iron gate between tall red-brick gateposts; beyond it a paling, with a row of high lime trees bordering a garden lawn, and on beyond that the irregular village street.